own case in the pocket of the light
overcoat he had prudently taken on coming out after eight o'clock.

As he lighted one of the cigarettes in that case, filled with so-called
Egyptian tobacco, mixed with opium and saltpetre, which he preferred to
the tobacco of the American, he mechanically glanced at the card which
the servant had left on going from the room-the card of the unknown
visitor for whom Madame Steno had left him.

Ardea read upon it, with astonishment, these words:

Count Boleslas Gorka.

"She is better than I thought her," said he, on reentering the deserted
office. "She had no need to bid me not to go. I think I should wait to
see her return from that conversation."

It was indeed Boleslas whom the Countess found in the salon, which she
had chosen as the room the most convenient for the stormy explanation she
anticipated. It was isolated at the end of the hall, and was like a
pendant to the terrace. It formed, with the dining-room, the entire
ground-floor, or, rather, the entresol of the house. Madame Steno's
apartments, as well as the other small salon in which Peppino was, were
on the first floor, together with the rooms set apart for the Contessina
and her German governess, Fraulein Weber, for the time being on a
journey.

The Countess had not been mistaken. At the first glance exchanged on the
preceding day with Gorka, she had divined that he knew all. She would
have suspected it, nevertheless, since Hafner had told her the few words
indiscreetly uttered by Dorsenne on the clandestine return of the Pole to
Rome. She had not at that time been mistaken in Boleslas's intentions,
and she had no sooner looked in his face than she felt herself to be in
peril. When a man has been the lover of a woman as that man had been
hers, with the vibrating communion of a voluptuousness unbroken for two
years, that woman maintains a sort of physiological, quasi-animal
instinct. A gesture, the accent of a word, a sigh, a blush, a pallor, are
signs for her that her intuition interprets with infallible certainty.
How and why is that instinct accompanied by absolute oblivion of former
caresses? It is a particular case of that insoluble and melancholy
problem of the birth and death of love. Madame Steno had no taste for
reflection of that order. Like all vigorous and simple creatures, she
acknowledged and accepted it. As on the previous day, she became aware
that the presence of her former lover no longer touched in